


Last Rites

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 05:56:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5697547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has imagined his own death at least a thousand times over, and perhaps he's looked forward to it more than a bit as well. And while none of those visions have ever included a girl who stubbornly refuses to leave him in peace, Kylo Ren supposes that he could have worse company here at the end of things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Rites

…

He has watched himself die a thousand times over, in his dreams, ever since he was a child and decided that being dead would mean finally getting to enjoy the resolved, encompassing solidity of past tensewithout worrying about the present and future as well. 

He’s seen his death suggested a thousand different ways, imagined with colorful and incisive detail inside the minds of his subordinates and superiors alike, and at such times he’s been glad that the helmet hides his knowing smile. 

Death, or at least the idea, is a very old acquaintance.

So by all rights and expectations, Kylo Ren ought to be feeling the serene, weightless self-possession of a prisoner going at last to his appointed execution.

Except none of those dreams or visions have ever involved a girl who refuses to go away, or let him get back to perishing with something that – in several decades, maybe, after multiple retellings – could resemble honor.

“It’s too late,” he tries again. “You need to leave.”  

Ren speaks this through clenched teeth. Smoke rolls off his skin, his clothes, and it’s a coin-toss decision whether the distributive shock or the tension pneumothorax will be what kills him first. There’s a creaking sound like bare branches each and every time he breathes. 

But Rey doesn’t seem to have heard him. 

Any aforementioned bright lights, when and if they appear to carry Ren off to who-knows-where, will probably be outshone by that white-hot iridescence still radiating off her skin. 

The body of Supreme Leader Snoke lies on the polished floor behind them, whatever their lightsabers have left of it. His head, meanwhile, lies some ten feet further beyond that – like killing a ripper-raptor lizard, Rey had helpfully explained. Decapitation is your only sure bet.

The First Order’s stronghold begins to crumble around them.

 _(“Now, I know how much you’ve drawn upon your grandfather’s biography as a model,”_ Snoke had said, because he has been Snoke inside Ren’s head for so long that calling him Darth Plagueis feels ill-suited. _“Shall we carry that imitation to its foregone conclusion?”)_

“Rey.”  His focus narrows to a pinpoint. His muscles convulse. “Tell my m – ”

“What’s that?” she shouts. “Sorry, my sensors aren’t adjusted to receive the Skywalker martyrdom speech just now. Your frequency’s too high.  Now keep still and be quiet, I’ve never tried this Force-healing stuff before.”

“I don’t need you to – ”

“You know, when Master Luke told me what you were like as a student, I assumed that bit about never listening was in a more spiritual sense – I said _keep still and be quiet._ ”

She rolls up her sleeves and rubs her hands together.

The motion is so relentlessly, absurdly sane that Ren has to stare, even before the light begins spreading from her palms. It falls down off her fingers in long, bright threads, goes through his injuries with the crude but earnest care of a child’s clumsy stitches. By now the pain is so vast and expansive that he seems to be drifting atop it.

 _(“Poor boy,”_ he had often heard, whispered into the shell of his ear once all the lights were out. _“None of them can see what potential you have – they’re so afraid of what you might turn into that they miss altogether who you could become.”_

_“If I – if I do – _when I’ve done_ what you’ve ask me to, Master, what will you give me in return? This has to be fair. Father says you can’t get something for nothing, and he knows that better than anyone else. Can you – will you give me peace, maybe?”_

_“Of course not. Peace is defined only by its past and future – it is not a thing in and of itself.”_ Then Snoke had laughed. “ _But I will give you purpose. Does that satisfy you?”_

 _“Yes,”_ he’d said, and even Snoke hadn’t known it was a lie.  _“That should be enough.”)_

Behind his closed eyes, Ren imagines the faces of everyone he has ever killed. 

Because, naturally, he would remember them all: every mind he’s ever cracked open, every body that has ever fallen at his feet into the posture of a mocking bow, every life he has ever put out like a candle or cut like a string.

_(“Thank you, Father.”)_

Yes, he thinks. Of course. This is how it has to be.

If there can’t be any proper order or reasoning in the universe as a whole – Father always did say he demanded too many answers, that he expected to find sense where there wasn’t any, and perhaps there’s not as much distinction between the Light and the Dark as he’s been told – then this one personal action may at least balance something out.

It should be her, lying here. It should be Rey: but it’s not, because he had moved faster.

(His life is pitifully inadequate as a conciliatory offering – she should know that, as a scavenger, with her keen eye for salvageable parts – but at the moment it’s all he has.)

“You see? This is fine,” Ren hears her say, between the pounding black waves of silence inside his head. “All I need you to do is stand up. I can’t carry you the whole way back to the ship myself, so you’ll have to throw in one good effort for me here and then I can take care of the rest. I’m on strict orders from the General – ”

Her voice is tight and distracted, the voice of someone engaged in a complicated bit of mechanical work. Her face has turned feverishly bright with the effort. 

“ – And if you think for one second that you’re going to slip out of everything just by dying at the most convenient possible time, I’ll tell you right now it doesn’t work that way. Master Yoda already tried that trick, and you see how it didn’t change anything –”

The Force weaves from her hands through his body, which has – practically speaking –  been dying for the past fifteen years.

(But he’s dreamed of this, so Ren knows this moment has been written down and waiting for him all his life, and there should be no sense of surprise. 

The only unexpected thing, really, is her.)

“—Also, what sort of limp-spined person walks off a shot from _Chewbacca’s bowcaster_ and then lets one little tap from a Sith Lord finish him? Put some effort behind this, would you? I can’t do anything if you don’t – ”

With slow, singular difficulty, Ren lifts one arm to grab her by the wrist. He has neither the strength nor the blaspheming courage to try taking her by the hand instead.

“Master Kenobi,” he says, simply. “You’ve done enough.”

She jerks her hands away. 

Her eyes stay fixed on him as she stands, as she wipes a long streak of his blood onto her jacket. The bright, steadfast quiet of her mind seems to go all the way down through him like sunlight through deep water.

“Yes,” she answers. “I think so.”    

(What, Ren thinks, could he possibly have ever hoped to teach her? He’ll laugh about it later, provided that there is one.) 

She steps away, one-two-three. Dust falls from the ceiling with the sighing and crumbling sound of dirt against a coffin’s lid. Ren is satisfied to note that the girl’s eyes are dry and clear. 

“Well,” Rey says. “Goodbye.” 

He nods. 

She turns, and walks away through the throne room’s far door, and she does not look back. 

Ren watches until he cannot see her anymore and then closes his eyes to wait.

And he remembers an island, rising up out of the water, the sea full of lights and shadows as a tide comes rolling in. 

He clutches two small handfuls of rough-thatched fur, streaked through by reds and browns and grays like the colors inside a stone. The village of Tuanul burns around him, and fire makes those peculiar bleached-bone curtains crackle like dry kindling. His mother winds her braids into a crown, the only crown she has ever needed to wear, and he waits patiently by to hand her one last silver pin. The former Master to the Knights of Ren falls over dead, as hemorrhaging blood spreads open like a flower through his brain, and every spectator drops obediently to one knee. His father stands with a credit chip in his left hand, a blaster gun in his right – he tosses the chip overhead, shoots a hole neatly through its center to the sound of a boy’s approving laughter, and he says _pretty good trick huh kid, not as good as the stuff you can do, but a pretty good trick all the same don’t you think._

He remembers a hand reaching up to lay itself against his face.

_(”But that's not true. My son is alive.”)_

And perhaps there’s one or two seconds, here, where a childish panic unfurls itself around him like a shroud, because Ren realizes that this will have been his whole life. 

Laid out end to end, down to the very last minute, this will be all there is to tell: and then the only thing he’ll leave behind for his mother or for anyone else will be the ghost of who he might have been, had things been any different. 

But he’s too tired for fear, and certainly too tired to weep when he has no right to do so – mourners are something you earn, not something you deserve – and thus Kylo Ren simply keeps his eyes closed and waits a little while longer. 

After all, there are many things worse than death. 

…

He has to open his eyes about five minutes later, however, to the sound of an almighty crash; he is just in time to watch his father's ever-faithful, never-beaten ship come careening straight through the fortress’ eastern wall. 

Stone pillars drop like felled trees. The metal hull throws orange sparks as it grinds to a halt. The boarding ramp’s switch must be broken, because there’s the loud sound of somebody stomping it open with a heel. 

Rey emerges from the raised dust cloud. She tips her flight goggles up to study him. 

“Hi. I’m back. You’re not dead yet, are you? I thought some wallowing in self-pity might help to limber you up a bit.”

The coughing nearly makes him faint. “You said – you said –  ”

“I said I couldn’t carry you the _whole way_ ,” Rey snaps. “I never said I couldn’t do it _at all_.Problem solved, right?”

“It would seem so.” 

And with one offered hand, she helps him to his feet. 

 _(”But that's not true,”_ he hears again, as he will no doubt go on hearing in whatever future follows this moment. _“My son is alive.”_ ) 

So Ben Solo allows her to do it. 

His left leg threatens to fold up beneath him, those first few steps that he attempts, but then it holds in place and somehow keeps him upright.

…


End file.
